In a recent article for the Shanker Institute, David Blazar and Matthew Kraft reflect on the findings of their recent study of teacher effects on students’ social and emotional skills:
A growing body of research is starting to provide convincing evidence that teachers can have large effects on students’ social and emotional development in addition to their academic performance. We contribute to this evidence and extend it by investigating specific teaching practices that promote these skills. Advancing our understanding of how teachers impact student outcomes beyond test scores and what we can do to support teachers in this work is especially critical as states, districts, and schools simultaneously wrestle with new ways to evaluate their teacher workforces and adopt new content standards that require teachers to incorporate higher-order thinking and social and emotional learning into the curriculum.
Although research traditionally has examined how teachers contribute to students’ performance on standardized tests, several recent studies have begun to document meaningful variation among teachers in their ability to improve a range of other student outcomes (see here, here, and here). These studies demonstrate substantive teacher effects on students’ social and emotional development, as well as observed school behaviors including absences and suspensions.
In recent work (see here), we extend the research base with three key findings. Like others who utilize value-added models, we found that teachers have substantial impacts on students’ self-reported self-efficacy, behavior, and happiness in the range of 0.14 to 0.23 standard deviations. This means, that, relative to an average teacher, teachers one standard deviation above the mean in effectiveness (i.e., at the 84th percentile of the distribution of effectiveness) move the medium student up to roughly the 55th percentile of students’ self-efficacy and behavior, and roughly the 60th percentile of students’ happiness. These effects are quite large.
We found that several teaching skills were strong predictors of improvements in students’ social and emotional outcomes. Teachers’ emotional support for and interactions with students was related both to their self-efficacy and happiness. Teachers’ classroom organization predicted students’ reports of their own behavior in class. Errors in teachers’ presentation of math content was negatively related to students’ self-efficacy and happiness. These intuitive relationships identify important mechanisms by which teachers impact students’ social and emotional development and, in turn, highlight several skills that could be targeted in both pre-service and in-service training programs.
Finally, we found that teachers were not equally effective at improving all outcomes. Of teachers in the top quintile of effectiveness based on their contributions to students’ mathematics test scores, only 41% were ranked in the top quintile of teachers who developed students’ self-efficacy; 32% were in the lowest two quintiles of effectiveness. These findings, along with similar results from studies using additional social and emotional measures (see here), add important empirical evidence on the multidimensional nature of teaching.
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